Andrew ("Drew") R. Bligh, 18, walks around with a notebook in his back pocket.

The West Springfield native, a freshman at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, uses it to jot down ideas for jokes as he goes through his day.

Bligh is a serious student who plans to major in engineering. But he's also serious about his comedy.

In fact, he has made it to the second round of RooftopComedy's National College Comedy Competition.

Eventually he could be vying for an all-expenses-paid trip to the Rooftop stand-up finals in Aspen, Colo., on June 12-13 - and the title of the country's funniest college student.

One of his rivals will be another young man with ties to Western Massachusetts. Alexander E. ("Alex") Hurst, 21, a Marymount Manhattan College student, grew up in Pittsfield and Lenox.

"I'm very proud of him," says his dad, the Rev. David F. Hurst, of Wilbraham. "When he was at Berkshire Community College for two years, he wrote a lot of one-act plays - some comedy, some drama.

"Alex and his older sister got a whole education through Shakespeare and Company," says Hurst, referring to the youth programs of the Lenox theater troupe.

The Marymount team will compete against New York University on Wednesday, while Bligh and his teammates will take on the Boston College team April 5 in Boston.

Bligh says his sense of humor came in handy as a first-year student on the Connecticut mega-campus. "I was surprised to find they have a very good comedy scene here at UConn," he said in a phone interview from Storrs.

"Stand-up comedy comes with a lot of work," he says. "You have to keep tweaking it and showing it to as many people as you can, to get feedback."

Fortunately, his roommate at UConn shares his sense of humor.

Bligh says he has always enjoyed having an audience because it challenges him. "As soon as I got one laugh, it gave me the energy to get through the whole show," he says.

"I enjoy making observations about everyday life, finding weird things people don't usually notice. And I don't mind making fun of myself."

Bligh also belongs to an improv troupe on campus.

He says his parents, Richard G. and Barbara Bligh, of West Springfield, have a similar sense of humor, and calls his sister, Amanda, "a hoot."

As a student at West Springfield High School, Bligh did what he could to liven up classes - but not at the expense of his schoolwork.

"I had fun," he says, "but I worked pretty hard."

RooftopComedy Inc. is a comedy business based in San Francisco. It records live stand-up comedy and syndicates it to the Web, mobile phones and broadcast outlet partners such as Nokia, Yahoo News, iTunes and Hulu, according to Rooftop spokesman Loren Pomerantz. It also hosts live comedy events.

For the first stage of the stand-up competition, Rooftop visited 32 colleges across the nation. This is the second year for the contest.

"The staff sets up the competition at each college, along with Buzzwire, the mobile partner," says Pomerantz.

Teams were selected by audience vote. After further competition, one member from each of four teams from different regions of the country will compete in Aspen.

"The exposure they receive by having their routines regularly broadcast online and 'mobile-ly' throughout the competition is the real prize," says Pomerantz.

"It enables them to introduce themselves to a worldwide audience, the same way that the 3,000 professional comics who work with RooftopComedy do."

The finals will be broadcast live on RooftopComedy.com, with viewers voting online to choose a winner.

Last year's winner in the stand-up competition was Tim Ball, a senior at Duke University in Durham, N.C.

In a phone interview, Alex Hurst sounded surprised to have made it this far. "I kinda entered as a joke," he said.